THE TO-DO LIST Mike Gayle (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99)

In this work of non-fiction, Mike Gayle, a 30-something Birmingham-based writer describes in detail how he tackled a 1,277 item to-do list, having bet his Sunday night pub friends that he would complete at least 99 per cent of it within a year. The list is a mixture of easy ones (buy shoe horn), bottomless pit ones (learn more about the solar system), ones that could contain all the others (hire a skip), some that are admirable (learn to appreciate Raymond Carver), some I wouldn’t consider (subscribe to Men’s Health), and some I don’t understand (perfect the three-pint manoeuvre).

I suspect that most of us have a list very like his, only much shorter, and that we wouldn’t dream of writing a whole book about it. For me, this book ranks alongside those about carrying a fridge around Ireland, being Dave Gorman, or doing clever things with red paperclips. It is easy to whiz through it and it will do you no harm.

As well as becoming more organised, the other main message of the book seems to be that one should appreciate friends and family more.

He does paint a charming picture of his family life (he has a very patient wife and two small kids), but he seems to think that it is the completion of his list that will allow him the status of “grown-up”, or turn him into a good husband and father. I’m sure that he has nothing to prove to his family and that he has been grown-up for years.

Did he complete it on time? I’ll leave you to find out. At the end, Gayle confesses that he was unable to come up with anything wise and clever for readers other than to encourage us to try to repeat his endeavour ourselves, but I guess that it is more liberating to realise that you can just take some things off a to-do list and not worry about doing them all anyway. However, I doubt if that tactic would lead to a book of any significant length.